The era of Speaker Boehner begins

John Boehner has had two decades to think about how Congress works — and how it doesn’t. Now, as he takes the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Wednesday afternoon, he finally gets a chance to refashion the House to match his vision.

The Ohio Republican’s blueprint, articulated through years of public comments and a new set of rules for the chamber, promises a House restructured to make it easier to cut rather than boost spending, to empower committee chairmen and rank-and-file lawmakers in the legislative process, to increase transparency, and to rebuild public trust in the institution by using those changes to make a more coherent connection between what people want and what their elected leaders do.

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“John is the right person at the right time,” Sen.-elect Rob Portman, who represented a neighboring chunk of the Cincinnati area for a dozen years, told POLITICO. “I think he understands the seriousness that our country faces on the fiscal front and on the economic front as you’ve seen in his approach to the swearing in this week. … He’s not triumphant, but he’s sober about it.”

If he is successful, Boehner hopes someday to be compared to his model, fellow Ohio Republican Nicholas Longworth, as a speaker of historic consequence.

But his skills as a manager and consensus builder will be tested at every turn — by conservatives impatient for faster action, by independents distrustful of ideological governance, by Democrats hungry for a return to power and by a press corps more than willing to point out when he fails to hit his lofty goals.

In contrast to Longworth, who gathered so much power in the office of the speaker by the mid-1920s that he threw recalcitrants off committees and was accused of “gagging” colleagues, Boehner has promised to open the process by giving more time for legislation to sit out in public and allowing members of both parties to offer amendments and participate in crafting legislation at the committee level.

It’s a promise born of Boehner’s own view of how the House should run and the necessity of appeasing tea party activists whose mantra “Read the Bill!” rang through the air outside the Capitol during debate on the massive new health care law last year.

Those close to Boehner believe he can tackle the twin challenges of addressing the nation’s problems while showing that Republicans can be trusted again to govern a few short years since the GOP was thrown out of power in 2006 amid accusations of abusing their power.

“I think John truly believed that we lost a lot of credibility of being a party of reform,” said Republican strategist Kevin Madden, who worked for Boehner when the GOP was last in the majority. “And he’s looking to restore that and maintain it and emphasize it,”